Veteran robot features eight legs and BeagleBoard

This spider-bot was built by [Zhanx] during his deployment in Iraq. He didn’t have prior hardware building experience and started out on this project when he received an Arduino to play with in September. Must be a fast learner! The parts are laser-cut from ABS plastic and connected to 24 servos. He sourced an SSC-32 serial servo control board to take care of the motor connections.

[Zhanx] has since migrated from the Arduino to a BeagleBoard which you can see perched atop the body in the video after the break. This should give him plenty of speed and power to improve the movement routines. There’s some nice work here but adding rubber feet, like on yesterday’s hexapod, wouldn’t hurt.

What do you think civilization just ceased when we invaded? I should imagine if anything (barring the language barrier) it’d be easier and certainly cheaper getting this sort of thing done in a machine shop there than here.

Looks awesome! Great job zhanx! Ive been keeping up with zhanx’s progress over IRC. I have to point out though, hes not using a beagle board! Thats a LeafLabs Maple! (full disclosure, Im from leaflabs ;)

How come I still see stuff I saw 20 years ago at the MIT AI labs? Pretending that using an atom to make some balancing calculations is a big deal, getting a hexapod to walk? This si Rondey Brooks stuff from 1991. Start being more abitious guys..